Zinke, a former Navy SEAL and state legislator, came to Marina Cay Resort to speak to Republican partisans.

...

“We need to focus on the real enemy,” he said, referring to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom he called the “anti-Christ.”

Zinke said he asked seven powerful Republicans if they think the nation is fixable. Only one in seven said, “Yes,” and that was former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “He is absolutely convinced,” Zinke said, noting he has sided with the Georgian. “He is a senior advisor to the campaign.”

Zinke finished his speech by handing out 50-calibre bullets to each of the four men who sponsored the event before a crowd of about 30 people.

Republicans loved the Affordable Care Act, when it was proposed by the Heritage Foundation and when it was known as Romneycare. That all changed when Barack Obama proposed it. Suddenly, the healthcare plan Republicans proposed as an alternate to Bill Clinton’s attempt at healthcare reform became “socialized medicine” and a host of other terms that Republicans clearly don’t understand. For example, it isn’t “government run health care” when the insurers, hospitals, pharmacies and clinics are privately owned and healthcare providers are not government employees. Naturally, calling it government run healthcare scares people. That always matters more to Republicans than niceties like facts and integrity.

Back in 2012, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Since then, Congressional Republicans voted to repeal the ACA 40 times and tried to blackmail the President into repealing it by shutting down the government. The Republican propaganda machine continues to manufacture hairy scary myths about the law, despite the fact that most of the people they keep claiming to represent want the bill fixed, but not repealed.

After 3+ years of obstruction, failed stunts and propaganda, Republicans finally came out with the “replace” part of Romney’s “replace and repeal.” Actually, it’s amazing that it took them 3 years to propose something even worse than what we had before the ACA became law.

It goes without saying that the “new” Republican proposal will take health insurance away from the millions of Americans who have insurance for the first time under the ACA. Naturally, the Republican plan doesn’t include any consumer protections such as free annual physicals or requiring coverage for mammograms and AIDS testing.

by Jon Brodkin -
President Barack Obama today spoke about the recent court decision that gutted the nation's network neutrality law, saying that he expects the FCC to take action to preserve the open Internet, which proved crucial in his presidential campaign.

"It's something that I've cared deeply about ever since I ran for office, in part because my own campaign was empowered by a free and open Internet and the ability for citizens all across the country to engage and create and find new ways and new tools to mobilize themselves," Obama said. "A lot of that couldn't have been done if there were a lot of commercial barriers and roadblocks and so I've been a strong supporter of net neutrality."

The Federal Communications Commission passed the current net neutrality rules, via the Open Internet Order, in 2010 during Obama's first term. The rules prevented Internet service providers from blocking Web applications or charging for access to the network. Verizon challenged the rules and got them overturned, but the FCC could rewrite the order to put it on a more solid legal footing.

Obama was asked about the court ruling this afternoon in a Google hangout.

Tom Perkins’s letter to The Wall Street Journal last week, in which he compared liberal attacks on the one percent to the Holocaust, was an anthropologically useful document that displayed the deranged persecution complex that afflicts large segments of America’s superrich in the Obama era. Lest you think Perkins is merely one slightly addled old man, who has slipped into a Howard Hughes–esque cosseted stupor, today the Journal devotes an editorial to defending him.

The Journal concedes that Perkins’s chosen metaphor may have gone a tad too far (“The comparison was unfortunate, yet provocative”). But, the Journal's editors argue, the fact that so many people disagreed with it proves the basic thrust of his argument: “The vituperation is making our friend's point about liberal intolerance — maybe better than he did.” Liberals are mocking wildly rich people who compare their plight to the victims of the Holocaust, and even if this mockery does not currently rise to the level of persecution of the Holocaust itself, really the spirit of the thing is about the same.

The editorial proceeds to defend its thesis by rattling off a list of terrible things that have happened to one percenters in the Obama era. The actual policy agenda that harms the rich — the restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for incomes over $400,000 a year, higher investment taxes to help fund Obamacare, regulation of Wall Street — is curiously absent from the list. Instead the Journal wanders through a farrago of partisan fever dreams. For instance:

Maybe the critics are afraid that Mr. Perkins is onto something about the left's political method. Consider the recent record of liberals in power. They're the ones obsessed with the Koch brothers and other billionaires contributing to conservative causes, siccing journalists to trash them and federal agencies to shut them down.

“Siccing journalists to trash” the Koch brothers can be translated as “a number of news reports and opinion commentary has criticized the Koch brothers.” Just like what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany! I follow the right-wing media pretty closely, and I have no idea what federal agencies shut down the Koch brothers, though I would simply point out that, ipso facto, they have not been shut down.

"The objective world simply is, it does not happen,” wrote mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1949. From his point of view, the universe is laid out in time as surely as it is laid out in space. Time does not pass, and the past and future are as real as the present. If your common sense rebels against this idea, it is probably for a single reason: the arrow of causality. Events in the past cause events in the present which cause events in the future. If time really is like space, then shouldn’t events from the future influence the present and past, too?

They actually might. Physicists as renowned as John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, Dennis Sciama, and Yakir Aharonov have speculated that causality is a two-headed arrow and the future might influence the past. Today, the leading advocate of this position is Huw Price, a University of Cambridge philosopher who specializes in the physics of time. “The answer to the question, ‘Could the world be such that we do have a limited amount of control over the past,’ ” Price says, “is yes.” What’s more, Price and others argue that the evidence for such control has been staring at us for more than half a century.

That evidence, they say, is something called entanglement, a signature feature of quantum mechanics. The word “entanglement” has the same connotations as a romantic entanglement: a special, and potentially troublesome, relationship. Entangled particles start off in close proximity when they are produced in the laboratory. Then, when they are separated, they behave like a pair of magic dice. You can “roll” one in Las Vegas (or make a measurement on it), your friend can roll the other in Atlantic City, N.J., and each die will land on a random side. But whatever those two sides are, they will have a consistent relationship to each other: They could be identical, for example, or always differ by one. If you ever saw this happen, you might assume the dice were loaded or fixed before they were rolled. But no crooked dice could behave this way. After all, the Atlantic City die changes its behavior depending on what is going on with the Las Vegas die and vice versa, even if you roll them at the same moment.

The standard interpretation of entanglement is that there is some kind of instant communication happening between the two particles. Any communication between them would have to travel the intervening distance instantaneously—that is, infinitely fast. That is plainly faster than light, a speed of communication prohibited by the theory of relativity. According to Einstein, nothing at all should be able to do that, leading him to think that some new physics must be operating, beyond the scope of quantum mechanics itself.